In this series, we’ll set up a base environment for the steps ahead using technologies that are fully cloud-provider agnostic — master them once, and you can apply them anywhere.
We’ll kick things off by installing cert-manager, which leverages Let’s Encrypt to automatically generate free SSL certificates. After installation, we’ll provision a real certificate to confirm everything is working.
From there, we’ll install ExternalDNS and validate it by registering a live service.
Finally, we’ll bring it all together with Ingress-NGINX — wiring up the cert-manager certificate and using ExternalDNS to register the ingress in Route 53.
Before diving in, define the following variables that will be referenced throughout the tutorial:
export DOMAIN_NAME=mydomain.com
export CLUSTER_NAME=mycluster
export AWS_ACCOUNT_ID="12345678"
export AWS_REGION="us-east-1"Ready? Start with Part I — cert-manager.